politics

Barnes Swoons, Gourevitch Laments and Time Says the Dems are in Trouble

Fred Barnes once again shows his fealty to the Bush clan this week, while other magazines opt for more substantitive fare.
June 6, 2006

Fred Barnes, executive editor of the Weekly Standard, is in love. He’s in love not only with George Bush – no news there – but, it turns out, with all things Bush, most especially including the president’s brother Jeb.

It wasn’t enough that Barnes wrote a swooningly hagiographic book titled “Rebel-in-Chief: Inside the Bold and Controversial Presidency of George W. Bush” back in January, and that in the pages of his magazine and in his capacity as a pundit on FOX News he bends like a willow tree to whatever course the president tracks. Now he seems to be putting the final touches on his application to be adopted by the Bush clan.

This week’s Standard features a Barnes-penned cover story titled “The Best Governor in America,” which is, if you haven’t figured it out by now, a love letter to the president’s kid brother who is wrapping up his two terms as governor of the state of Florida.

Barnes tells us Jeb is a “rockstar” in Florida politics, who “has had a positive impact on the state in almost every conceivable way–economically, fiscally, educationally, politically, and the list could go on and on.”

Most of all, Barnes wants us to understand that Jeb Bush is actually a governor who works hard. As proof, he relates the story of an aide once getting an email from the governor — at 2 am. (Is there anyone out there who has never gotten an email from an insomniac boss at 2 am? If so, tell me where you work and I’m on the way.)

Meantime, on more serious business, The New Yorker‘s Philip Gourevitch offers a depressing, but sober, look at Darfur. He notes that the United States has never once intervened militarily for purely humanitarian reasons (although many in and out of government now pretend that that’s why we went into Iraq), and says that after three years of deadlock in Iraq, any chance that we might do so soon are all but dead: “The interventionist impulse–whether it is espoused by liberal humanitarians or neocon hawks–is not much in favor these days.”

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Intervention, even if morally right, is next to unthinkable, Gourevitch says: “There are dozens of ethnic groups in Darfur, and at least three fractious rebel movements, in addition to the janjaweed, the Army, and the Air Force, and it is not clear which of them would be on our side, or whose side we would want to be on. In addition, the Bush Administration has cultivated the Sudanese regime (once host to bin Laden and Al Qaeda) as one of its unlikely new allies in the war on terror, and Washington has long supported the dictatorship in neighboring Chad, which is in a state of increasingly open hostility toward Sudan.”

Newsweek leads this week with a cover story about the alleged massacre by U.S. Marines of a group of Iraqi civilians in the town of Haditha in November 2005. The story goes much further than others have in giving the story the context it deserves, making this one a must-read. The magazine’s Evan Thomas and Scott Johnson place Kilo company of the Third Battalion, First Marines — the guys accused of the massacre — at the battle of Fallujah in November 2004, where they lost 17 men in 10 days in vicious house-to-house fighting, and they note that by November 2005, when the purported massacre occurred, “the young Marines were worn out. This was their third tour in Iraq in three years.”

Thomas and Johnson also note that “the scale of the tragedy should not be exaggerated. America still fields what is arguably the most disciplined, humane military force in history, a model of restraint compared with ancient armies that wallowed in the spoils of war or even more-modern armies that heedlessly killed civilians and prisoners.” That’s context. And the takeaway is that things like this don’t just happen. Kilo company, as with so many other units, had endured three years of counterinsurgency warfare with no training in how to handle it — watching friends and fellow Marines taken out one by one by an invisible enemy using unconventional means.

Time also leads with the Haditha story, but the magazine also contains a little gem by Perry Bacon Jr. and Mike Allen about the prospects for Democrats in this year’s midterm Congressional elections.

The piece concentrates on the fight within the party between Representative Rahm Emanuel and DNC chair Howard Dean, and their conflicting ideas on how to win this fall. Emanuel wants to pour money into individual races that Democrats have the potential to win, while Dean is funneling money into building a party-building apparatus to counteract the well-coordinated Republican national apparatus.

As one can imagine, hilarity, along with the usual “Democrats-can’t-get-their-act-together” theorizing, ensues.

Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.